Hacker News Reader

Comment by ty_a | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain is perfect for its original use case, a distributed trustless database. The tradeoffs don't make any sense for a trusted system, i.e. replacing SWIFT or storing titles to property.

View on HN

All the evidence to date suggests that banks are much more capable of providing useful financial services than blockchains. Can you give a counter example of a real world use?

Depend on what you mean by financial services. For example, no bank can beat crypto in price for remitting ~$1k to Southeast Asia within a couple of hours. I spent years as a digital nomad and there was no traditional fiat solution that came close.

I couldn't even find a traditional solution that beat crypto for converting ~$10k USD in the US to CAD in Canada (although I did have to write a script to do this via crypto and it sometimes took a few days for the markets to align favourably).

On the other hand, I highly doubt blockchain is going to beat banks at their main business of being a middleman between savers and borrowers.

I moved from the US to Canada. Banks wanted to hold my transferred money for a month even though they got the cash within 3 days.

with cryptocoins I wouldn't have had to move the money at all.

So why didn't you convert your USD to Bitcoins, move, then convert your Bitcoins back to CAD as you needed CAD?

I kept the money in kind. It was merely transferred from bank to bank.

FWIW I kept my BTC in kind as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com